Emancipation Strategy

Spectacular transformations accompanied the struggle: Some advocates of slavery found themselves performing a gradual (or sudden) about-face as they came to loathe the institution—or else oppose it for opportunistic reasons of their own—and some white supremacists discovered that their bigotry was ill-grounded. Alliances shifted and broke apart, erstwhile enemies became the unlikeliest of allies, and so forth.

Impressions of a great many admirable, hideous, and ambiguous personalities leap from these pages: John J. Crittenden, the stubborn pro-slavery senator from Kentucky; the quirky political general Benjamin Butler; Frederick Douglass, the fearless black abolitionist; Lorenzo Thomas, a brigadier general given plenipotentiary powers to recruit black troops and who threatened to throw out of the Army any racist officers who opposed him; the cantankerous and deeply racist Blair family of Maryland and Missouri, who were opposed to the spread of slavery; August Belmont, the pro-slavery financier, Manhattan socialite, and Democratic party leader; key Radical Republicans; members of the Lincoln cabinet; and Abraham Lincoln himself. 

Most of all, however, Richards chose to weave his account around Representative James Ashley of Ohio, the Radical Republican who played the foremost role in pushing the 13th Amendment through Congress. (Anyone who saw Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln a few years ago may remember its portrayal of Ashley.) And one of the points that emerges here with particular force is the Herculean effort ridding America of slavery required and the knife-edge contingency upon which the outcome hovered during most of the Civil War. 

From the Founding Fathers onward, the eminently moderate and arguably sensible idea of phasing out slavery by compensating the slave-owners—the method that the British used successfully during the 1830s to banish slavery from the West Indies—was opposed with fanatical intensity by many, if not most, American slave-owners. Let the economic determinists take note of this case study: Slavery was not fundamentally, or at least not exclusively or principally, a matter of money and wealth. The most virulent defenders of slavery could not be bought off by anyone: They could not even be paid to do the right thing.

There were other forces, beyond economics, at work: Slavery provided a ready outlet for power-lust, domination, and, of course, the near-universal lunacy (prevalent in both North and South) of race ideology, built upon the notion that the outward physical features of our fellow human beings are indicators of inward character traits, either good or bad. But it was the Civil War itself—a war caused by the slavery dispute, as the proclamations of secession by South Carolina, Mississippi, and other slave states make clear—that provided the horrific, but nonetheless priceless, leverage that was needed to rid the United States of slavery.

After preparatory chapters that set the stage by examining micro-politics in several distinctive arenas, Richards brings it all together by showing how James Ashley gathered the swing votes necessary to push the 13th Amendment through the House of Representatives. His fundamental strategy was to target Northern and border-state Democrats who were lame ducks and thus largely immune to the threat of political retaliation for breaking with their own party’s overwhelmingly racist orthodoxy.

Yet there was more: In order to sweeten the whole proposition, Ashley worked with Lincoln to offer these swing-vote Democrats “incentives.” Yes, some Democrats who swung the right way got rewarded, and Richards concludes that—as rumor had it at the time, and as the Spielberg version portrayed so memorably—Lincoln was deeply complicit in the dealmaking that killed off slavery once and for all. Richards correctly observes that there is no “smoking-gun” evidence to show exactly what Lincoln did. But he concludes that the reason for this is that Lincoln made certain to leave no written traces whatsoever: 

Richards is certain that Lincoln authorized Ashley to make such deals. But this leads to a major problem in Richards’s account: Except for the dealmaking—along with the abundant evidence that Lincoln was fervently in favor of the amendment and pushed it through Congress as quickly as possible after his 1864 reelection—Lincoln comes off here as something of a dithering fuddy-duddy, a temporizer who skulked in the shadows and sided with the most retrograde members of the Republican party when it came to the slavery issue.

It is not at all unusual, in this day and age, for accounts of the antislavery crusade to make the abolitionists and Radical Republicans the foremost heroes, relegating Lincoln to secondary status. This is, to some extent, understandable: In any campaign to propel great historical change, the fiery activists who occupy the vanguard of the movement play a necessary and decisive role. Without them, the movement would lack the requisite dynamic force, and it would never gather momentum. But such people, by themselves, are often incapable of summoning all of the diverse forms of power needed to achieve ultimate victory. Even Ashley, in the end, had to focus his thoughts on the grubby and practical politics of making deals with unsavory characters.

One can make the case that, throughout the Civil War, Lincoln played an indispensable role in coordinating, with exquisite calibration, the force that the antislavery movement required. And that he did so through extraordinary coalition-building and by balancing his fiery antislavery convictions—convictions that come through with overwhelming power if one reads his pre-presidential speeches and letters from the 1850s—with worst-case contingency planning. 

So many of Lincoln’s actions that come off as timid or cowardly in Richards’s account must be understood in light of one simple, terrible fact: The whole effort might have failed if any one of a number of variables had gone wrong for the Civil War Republicans. If the Confederates had achieved final victory on the battlefield, or if Lincoln had been thrown out of office and replaced by a pro-slavery Democrat, the antislavery movement might have suffered a catastrophic defeat from which it might never have recovered. Without Lincoln’s virtuosity, though, all the efforts of James Ashley and his outspoken friends might have been in vain. 

Richard Striner, professor of history at Washington College, is the author, most recently, of How America Can Spend Its Way Back to Greatness: A Guide to Monetary Reform.